Free Tools as a Growth Strategy - is it Genius or a Waste of Dev Resources? 🤔
I've been thinking about building some free tools to complement our main product, and I'd love to hear your experiences and thoughts.
The idea is to create practical, standalone tools that solve specific pain points while potentially driving traffic to the main product. But I have some questions:
- How much dev time is reasonable to invest in free tools?
- Should they closely relate to your main product, or can they target adjacent problems?
- What's your experience with free tools converting to paid customers?
- Has anyone seen significant SEO benefits from their free tools?
- How do you balance maintaining free tools with core product development?
I see companies like Hubspot and Mailchimp doing this successfully, but I'm curious about smaller SaaS experiences.
Also, for those who've tried this: what worked better - completely free tools or "free with signup"?
I would love to hear your success stories, failures, and everything else!
PS: I recently built a free tool for our platform out of necessity because LinkedIn wouldn't allow text posts to be formatted. This tool complements our main app, which is a carousel post maker.
I launched it on Monday, and in 5 days, I have 158 visitors to that free tool.
I would love it if you could try it and share your feedback: Free LinkedIn Post Editor.
It's great for small projects that take less time to build and are really helpful to others. This results in traffic on the builder profile. Keep it up; it's great.
Thank you :D
Great insights, Muneeb! From my experience with creating SEO AI, practical, standalone tools not only address user pain points but also boost organic traffic to your main product.
Thank you for the validation .. have you been able to get lots of organic visitors through your free tools?
We built some cool ones. Have money to promote them? If not don't start.
Haha, damn.
Can't we bring in new users organically?